IVORY TOWERS

Ivory Towers is the solo music project of Vancouver, BC artist Quinne Rodgers. Combining her background in visual art with a DIY approach, she creates all of the Ivory Towers artwork, videos, and costumes herself. Ivory Towers’ music is completely self-produced, combining briny synths, organic samples and a ghostly chorus of vocals to create crystalline, deeply personal dreamscapes. Quinne is previously half of feminist dark electronic duo MYTHS, a multi-media project that performed an electronic opera and toured with Grimes and Elite Gymnastics.

The most recent Ivory Towers release, ‘Vile’, was called “darkly beautiful” and “an intensely haunting and empowering feminist missive” by Gorilla vs. Bear, and “weighty, emotionally and intellectually charged” by Exclaim. Built upon the groundwork of choral arrangements and samples of her own voice, these electronic hymns entwine the personal, historical and fantastical, and political themes of imperialism and power. ‘Purity Control’ is a searing indictment of the “pro-life” movement, with Ivory Towers using the story of her own abortion to destroy the movement’s cloak of concern that it uses to subjugate women. ‘no devil lived on’ is a high fantasy of revenge upon imperialism, pitting the English king Edward I against a pack of Maenads, the vicious otherworldly women of Greek lore (it is also an audio palindrome, meaning it sounds exactly the same played either backwards or forwards). ‘Hel’s Belles’ considers eating the privileged and burning the places of power to the ground.

‘Vile’ is a departure from the delicateness of her debut EP, the self-released ‘Endling’. Containing samples from the natural world such as burning charcoal, the buzzing of wasp wings, and whale song, it has been described as “jittery ASMRcore” (Weird Canada) with “avant-classical melodies” (Chart Attack) and “siren-like vocals” (Stereo Beasts).

Between EPs, Ivory Towers released the ‘Gorgononium’ mixtape for free on Soundcloud, which she composed out of remixed elements of her new material, including samples of bats, rain and sound effects from the X-Files and the Silent Hill video game.